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Like many story tellers I love a good awkward moment and found that at an early age they seemed to find me no matter where I was, so I’ve learned to find all the great humor in it! Lately though my new found interest in social media has brought about more odd situations to find myself in. So I’m sitting in a conference, and I see a few faces of people I recognize that I have met through twitter. We’ve all chatted through twitter a few times back and forth on what is going on in the ag community and such, so I go to say hi. I get this awkward look, I introduce my self via my twitter name @ORfarmer and they realize who I am. From this point on you would think that our easy twitter conversations would naturally lead to an easy face to face chat…nope! It’s almost like we can’t quite wrap our heads around how to talk with the limit of 140 characters; myself included. Our voices are so loud and there is no delete key, how do we control this awful situation?! I leave feeling completely awkward…what the heck just happened?!

Let’s just say we didn’t talk anymore in person and eventually after the conference we got back to our regular twitter feeds and are keeping up that way, 140 carefully written and hash tagged tweets. This is hard for me to get used to. I’m a pretty social person but in a way I felt like I was breaking some weird rule about who you can actually approach, maybe there is a precedence that I am not aware of? Then I think “Come on people!” The social media network is a different medium that I’m slowly adjusting to. I got a flyer about twitter pointers the other day and it said on there that you don’t need to know the people that you’re following, or that are following you. This makes total sense now, but at the time I felt like that was so creepy! Now I realize that what you put on twitter is what makes it not so creepy since it’s mostly about farming and interesting things I find and not about how I brushed my teeth a few minutes ago.

So I’m thinking about all of this, trying to not get annoyed at this socially odd situation, when I’m at another event and I see a Facebook friend. We aren’t best friends but I sort of know the person. They even liked something on my page a few days before! I see them, they ignore me, I approach them, and once again it’s awkward. What the heck, maybe I’m just having this kind of luck or maybe I’m the weird one. But really who cares. So here is what I have to say…PEOPLE if you see someone you know say hi, it won’t kill you, and if they say hi first and it’s not (I know this is scary) in typeface and online, get over it and put a dang sentence together…audibly!

I have to say though that awkward moments make for some good stories, so maybe keep it up all you nerdys out there who won’t say hi and just stalk everyone online; because in the end I’m afraid I’m probably one of you 🙂